Women, High Technology, and Society Conference

Abstract

In June, 1985, the Silicon Valley Research Group of the University of Califor nia, Santa Cruz, held a conference on Women, High Technology and Society. The Research Group conceived the topic broadly, to include not only the na tional and international effects of new technological (particularly microcom puter) developments on women in workplaces, but also the questions of women workers' responses and more general cultural effects of increasing so cietal computerization. The conference thus brought together researchers working in three general areas: women as workers in computer and other firms heavily affected by high technology; women as white collar work ers in increasingly computerized workplaces; and the cultural constructions of gender in social formations whose base is increasingly com puterized. Researchers in the production area focused on changing capital/labor relations as technologies changed and on issues of worker resistance or consent to new relations. Maria Patricia Fern?ndez-Kelly (University of California, San Diego), whose current group research project encompasses women garment and electronics workers in Los Angeles, Miami and New York City, reported an increase in self-contracting, home work and piecework in these industries. Aihwa Ong (University of California, Berkeley), who has done research among women microelectronics workers in Malaysia, discussed the differing discourses of American and Japanese transnational operating there. While American managements impose capitalist work dis cipline through fostering the culture of female beauty, mobility and individu alism, Japanese firms attempt to fit into prior sets of expectations through stressing women workers' joint moral obligations to parents and management. Nance Goldstein (Thames Polytechnic) reported on her research on mi croelectronic firms in Scotland?the area of highest concentration of silicon chip outside of California. Goldstein concentrated on gender dif ferences in training programs for workers as the industry developed. She noted that men rather than women were recruited for training for new skilled